Sarah’s Key (***)

Movies that go back and forth between now and long ago tend, in my experience, to feel a little artificial. They might just as well be straight period pieces; the modern-day parts can seem like just a crap device to make the old story more obviously relevant to modern-day audiences. But see what you think of the one here, which tells a small piece of a somewhat forgotten part of the Holocaust, the French part. Kristin Scott Thomas plays an American journalist working in Paris who a) happens to have earlier written a piece on the role of collaborators rounding up Jews and is writing another one; b) learns just then that she has a family connection with the awful history. She is also just then learning she is pregnant, fifteen years after she and her husband had their only child, a daughter.

Sarah is a young girl who, in the flashback sequences, hides her little brother in a cupboard when the Jews of Paris are rounded up in July 1942. Even though I’ve seen lots of scenes like this on film, they still have a lot of power. The film then embodies two mysteries to be uncovered by the journalist. First, what happened to the boy, locked away as his family was sent first to an overcrowed arena (“like the Superdome, only a million times worse” says one character), then to more distant places that were pit stops on the way to death camps. Second, what happens to Sarah, which takes our reporter across the ocean and back. A third mystery, but less involving, involves Sarah, her husband, and the child she carries.

The connection to the present is integral to the plot and does have some cleverness, but I did find it more clever than authentic. If I hadn’t known already that the story was taken from a novel (by Tatiana de Rosnay), I think I’d have placed odds against it being a true story. There is too much melodrama, and the way it explores moral ambiguity too obvious. When, for example, Sarah’s family and the other Jews of her neighborhood are taken, a neighbor shouts “They had it coming.” Another yells in reply, “You fool! It’ll be our turn” next. The one thing it’s not is sappy. Or dull. A little more 1940s and less 2000s would have improved the balance, though.

IMDB link

viewed at Ritz 5 and reviewed 8/3/11